At 7:46 AM -0700 7/30/98, Melanie Morreale wrote:Gabe, thank you for taking the time to read the chapter and for your two reactions below. This chapter is now in the hands of our development editor for the point-by-point, checking commas sort of editing. Your global feedback below is helpful because it isn't the type of feedback we get from the dev. editor. The chapter will be in a basic course textbook for 18-22 year olds; so figuring out their take on technology etc. is a challenge. Your thoughts are helpful in that regard. This chapter was written by my co-author for the book and I would like to share your thoughts with him. Would that be ok? Totally up to you.

My emails are generally considered public knowledge, so I am not prepared to deny you the energies you've requested, Melanie. Sure, I'd be honored. Thanks for any small corrections in my text you make. On a reread today in your mail I noticed them. But I'll leave that to your discretion.

Thanks again,

GT

[dropshadowbox align="left" effect="lifted-bottom-left" width="350px" height="" background_color="#ffffff" border_width="1" border_color="#dddddd" ]Date: Wed Jul 29, 1998 - This streak of gray nostril had been pulled tight like a surveyor's chain into the passion of yet another tugboat writer being considered persuasive enough to waive a gentleman's hearing in front of the Ways and Means Committee to pave with back doors and easter eggs his Georgia bread, crass, even crafty brown swallow throat now suddenly quenched with ease for a generation.[/dropshadowbox]Here's to wordwhacking you Melanie, so firstly, I apologize for the already lengthy spell of silence. I'd read the pages by the third night I had them from Clyde, in two sessions; spent the next days critiquing your various points with Sue, my great listener. First of all, it was a marvelous read. Please, I thank you for the opportunity. Your own emphasis of perspective only came into question a couple of times as a result of the "superficial" read you requested, and so I pondered the dilemmas often as the days squeezed by perhaps not as superficially as expected.

The bulk of the chapter is readable, enjoyable, informative, accepted on its own terms.

Two issues however. The implied conviction of whether the entire planet will be, should be, can strategically ever become, a no nonsense, it's modern, it's everywhere, saved by the wire community, peaceful but noisy, dangerous but secretly altogether in a place where nobody's left standing but the adverbs, flogged by an environmental urgency I think is still bound over to the jury for further investigation. Dystopian nightmares are real and spreading into the camps of former stalwarts for jurisdictional containment. It seems to me that the numbers boasting a mere 20% global computer infiltration, but hurry, or you'll be left out in the cold sales pitch, is a mixed message, a statistical non-sequitor in a world in which we rarely predict correctly all the unplanned but highly mitigating circumstances of each twist in fate. Technology's dance is indisputable. But will today's technology and that proffered place where each generation of merry practitioners will lead the spectacular world to greater fulfillment, ultimately transform the global village into a common ground or is this beast of information wires truly the reckoning hand of divisional chaos?

It's no small hope that we might indeed gain certain creature advantages at the expense of a distant past, but are we merely indulging a playful fantasy when we imagine that all things move in pace and engage with as much quality as we would like them to, especially when our daily lives produce great evidences that this is rarely true, for even among the most genuine and cultured spirits, the synchronized lifers or conversely, those aflight the butterfly paradox each of us face a plethora of pandoras the whole sensitive as we struggle along the yellow bricked information superhighway. And because everybody in the wired, wired west already knows this to be the dirt intrinsic to less bitter and progressively better existence as long as it's moderated by human notions of fun rather than work, ease rather than complexity, whimsy rather than concrete order, this critical mass where technology's push into our lives may dominant our consciousness is subject to the high standards cold media must meet if indeed humanity is to be served rather than be rendered servile to the peculiar needs of spectacular technology. This sounds complex, but it's not. Humanity can only move as fast as its slowest members.

And secondly, I found your section on hierarchical E-mail protocols rather strange, almost quaint. Not a day passed when I wasn't reconsidering just what sort of response you on perch should reasonably expect from a petite reactionary passing the inkwell in a far more pressing pose than that of the unsifted writer, but nevertheless you did ask for a response, and I agreed to provide this fair shot. Once upon a time dear ole Netiquette was all the rage, but SPAM trolls and advertising bandits have shown some staying power, despite all the hoopla to stop the intrusionaries in their tracks. Truth is the Internet in many ways simply mirrors society. In other ways, former fine lines of distinction are blurred in advancement of the more idealistic equal access instincts, the alias-generating naming riffs, and other democratic nee individualistic protocols not easily packaged in a one size fits all sense of abiding the technology. This struggle to map our peaceful future will be here for several generations yet, I think. Of all the discussions we had the other day on the boat, I was most caught off guard when you asked for predictions, say, to the end of capitalism, the end of paper, books as we know them...

Who knows? It depends on whether we can all just get along I suppose, long enough to figure out a way to play nice among the Others, and avoid blowing up the sandbox in any number of well-tested ways. But I did enjoy the chapter, and in meeting you and Clyde on Skip's boat. Is this work ever to be made available to the web?

Oh, and there was one other thing. I think for kids raised on computers and the Internet, this textbook chapter might seem a bit obvious, and somewhat sterile to the heres and theres of wirepower, but then I confess I am not an educator, and may presume that kids who know the technology also assume responsibility for their actions. But even as I write that line, I realize how stupid it sounds.

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